Encyclical

How is it possible that in America, on the 47th anniversary of Earth Day, it was concluded that our situation was so dire that what was needed was not just a march for aggressive climate policies, but rather a “March for Science” itself?

Small-minded, corrupt, and power hungry state governors banning the mere use of the phrase “climate change” in official communications seemed laughable at the time. But now the ignorant and dangerous Trump regime has signaled double-digit cuts to scientific research, including climate science, after appointing a climate-denier to head the Environmental Protection Agency.

One cannot help but notice history repeating itself. A mere 401 years ago, an Inquisition under the direction of Pope Paul V issued a Special Injunction against Galileo instructing him to “abandon completely the opinion that the sun stands still at the center of the world and the earth moves, and henceforth not to hold, teach, or defend it in any way whatever, either orally or in writing.”

In 1616, Pope Paul and his minions’ concerns were quite clear: the heliocentric worldview “explicitly contradicted” the literal interpretation of the Holy Scripture. The “alternative facts” of an earth-centered universe were the very foundation of the Pope’s power over the Western world. Consequently, the unquestioned power of the Church would be undermined if the heliocentric view were to be accepted as fact.

Fast forward to the present day. Like all things Trump, the present situation is both worse and more complex than it might appear. First, let’s be clear: Trump is more putz than Pope, an ignorant narcissist, but also a clever opportunist at his core. Trump’s influence in the world is, by comparison, a far cry from that of Pope Paul V 400 years ago. But we have given Trump, with the aid of the Russians or not, frightening power—in absolute terms far greater and more dangerous than any Pope has ever had.

But here’s why the situation is both more complex—and more of an opportunity—than meets the eye. The science most of us believe we are marching for is the science of the Scientific Revolution that Copernicus and Galileo ushered in 400 years ago. It is rooted in the reductionist logic—simplify what is complicated by breaking it down into understandable parts—that brought us airplanes, iPhones, and all the progress we hold dear. It opened up the way to the Enlightenment, which replaced blind faith in the doctrines of the Church with a belief in each individual’s human potential.

In the ultimate irony: it is the modern day Pope who understands what the reductionist science of Modernity and what contemporary “leaders” don’t see (and Trump could not understand). In the Pope’s words, included in his beautiful Encyclical, Laudato Si, “We urgently need a humanism capable of bringing together the different fields of knowledge, including economics, in the service of a more integral and integrating vision.”

We appear to have entered a new era, a Second Scientific Revolution, that is permeating all fields of knowledge. Integrated medicine, regenerative agriculture, integral urban design, and the entire study of ecology are all examples of this systems-based approach. In it, integral or holistic thinking is augmenting the reductionist method, unlocking unimagined potential, and, in the process, the only genuine solutions to the critical and complex challenges of our time to emerge at the edges of our individual disciplines. Our failure to make this transition is a life and death matter. It is critical to our understanding the interconnected climate and other ecosystem crises, the healthcare crises, and the economic system crises accelerating around us at an exponential rate.

Is it possible that the Trump insanity might just be the jolt our scientific research community needs to make the historic, essential, and immensely difficult shift into effective transdisciplinary thinking and collaboration? For example, how much of the National Institute of Health’s immense $30 billion annual budget goes towards “chasing a cure for cancer” (using the best reductionist science) when those researching (with pennies in comparison) and practicing integral health – both physical and mental – increasingly understand that a “disease” like cancer is actually often a mere symptom, whereas the genuine root cause (holistically understood) is more likely to relate to communication breakdowns at a cellular level in the natural regenerative capacities of our immune system?

If we want to reverse the health crisis (much less the healthcare crisis), we must invest in better understanding and support of our immune system, and immune system health begins with the food we eat and the soil it is grown in, most of it now toxic from the financially entrenched, industrial agriculture system our reductionist method delivered to us unaware of the disastrous unintended consequences. How about in response to the Trump budget shake-up, an allocation of just 10 percent of the NIH budget to regenerative agriculture, which will enhance health and unlock the massive potential for real climate solutions through natural carbon sequestration in the process. This is but one example of the potential that lies at the “edges” of disciplines that will be revealed in the Second Scientific Revolution.

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t support cutting science research so we can increase our insanely bloated military budget. But far more important than a few years of budget chaos is the need to understand our future in the integral age lies in probing across disciplines, not merely digging ever deeper into each one, treating symptoms rather than root causes. Systems and established institutions don’t change without a shock to the system. Let us work creatively and smartly to use the Trump circus, with all its ignorance and bluster, as that needed shock opening up unimagined new possibilities. In human and ecological health, and in our economic health.

The Second Scientific Revolution is indeed afoot, ushering in the rise of integral science – the physical sciences and social sciences together. It is happening, but it is happening outside our leading institutions, which by design are resistant to such threatening challenges, just as the Church was four centuries ago. Woven together as never before with the great wisdom traditions—Western, Eastern, and indigenous, all of which have stood the test of time—it will trigger a movement future historians may call the “Great Second Enlightenment”. It will demand universal participation, our best and most creative minds, bodies, and souls, and give much-needed meaning to our lives.

How to reconcile the “invisible hand” with the “Golden Rule?” That question first preoccupied my mind while I was a Managing Director at (the old) JPMorgan in the late 1990’s and inspired the creation of Capital Institute in 2010. Too often, discussion around this question devolves into the same shallow debate (Capitalism versus Communism or Socialism) we see now in response to Pope Francis’ encyclical on the environment, Laudato Si’: On Care For Our Common Home, in anticipation of his visit to the United States this week. While social outcomes across economic systems are rightly the subject of continuous debate, the truth is, no system of political economy that has operated in modern times is sustainable from an ecological perspective: not present day Capitalism; not the Social Democracies of Scandinavia; and certainly not our experiences with Communism in the Soviet Union or China. Marxist scholars will correctly argue that true Marxism has yet to be tried on a large scale. I would say the same is true for the free enterprise system Adam Smith imagined when he coined the phrase “invisible hand” in his Wealth of Nations, where he explained the critical role self-interest plays in a free market economy:

“It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.”

But Smith’s “self-interest” should not be confused with Gordon Gekko’s “greed is good” that permeates modern finance-driven capitalism. Students of Smith are aware that the philosophical underpinnings of his thinking appear in his earlier work, The Theory of Moral Sentiments. It is there that Smith laid out his central idea that individual selfish acts would be self-regulated in our human nature by what he called “sympathy” (what today translates better as “empathy”). The book begins:

“How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortunes of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it, except the pleasure of seeing it…That we often derive sorrow from the sorrows of others, is a matter of fact too obvious to require any instances to prove it; for this sentiment, like all the other original passions of human nature, is by no means confined to the virtuous or the humane…The greatest ruffian, the most hardened violator of the laws of society, is not altogether without it.”

In other words, Smith believed that the invisible hand would be constrained
by an ethic of reciprocity, what is generally referred to as the “Golden Rule” (i.e. do unto others as you would have them do unto you). Such a humanistic ethic of empathy and compassion is universal, uniting virtually all great religions and wisdom traditions across cultures throughout the ages. No government intervention required. It’s certainly difficult to reconcile certain aspects of modern day capitalism with a free enterprise system guided by a humanistic invisible hand built on an ethic of reciprocity that Adam Smith envisioned a quarter century earlier. So where did we get lost? First, we must embrace intelligently designed-market based solutions that will be essential for the energy system transition ahead. And while we can justifiably rant about lost morals, there is a systemic answer to where modern capitalism has lost its way that is subtler, and lies in the encyclical itself when Francis refers to the “reductionism which affects every aspect of human and social life.” Reductionism of course is the useful method of analysis dating back to the Enlightenment in which we break down what’s complicated into its component parts. But in doing
so, we too often lose sight of the whole – always greater than the sum of the parts – sometimes with disastrous consequences. Silos in academia and companies, the primacy of shareholder value still taught in most business schools, the 2008 financial collapse, and our failure to manage complex challenges like climate change via special interest delegations are well-known manifestations of our over-reliance on reductionist thinking. Smith was part of the Enlightenment thinkers ushering in the Age of Reason and individualism with its forces of logic and analysis over the traditional lines of authority, most notably the overbearing authority of the Catholic Church itself. It would no doubt surprise him to learn that economics had become separated from the humanist impulse underlying his thinking, and that the reductionist method would become conflated with “science” and “technological progress” affecting (and at times overwhelming) “every aspect of human and social life” at the dawn of the 21st century. Modern science (quantum physics, the web of life) understands that everything is connected to everything. So too do all major religions and virtually all wisdom traditions understand this core principle, often summarized by the concept of “oneness.” Our challenge now, after 500 years of amazing progress in many respects, rooted in Enlightenment derived-reductionist thinking, is to usher in what the Pope calls an “integral and integrating vision” in alignment with what Adam Smith himself intuited. Such integral, or holistic thinking lies at the heart of our collaborative journey to a vision for Regenerative Economies at Capital Institute based on illuminating the universal patterns and principles (including reciprocity) that govern all systems that survive in the cosmos, re-uniting once again Ecology, Economy, and a humanist Spirit in harmonious right relationship. The regenerative framework is grounded in the rigor of our latest scientific understanding of all energy flow systems (everything is energy) ranging from how water boils in a pot all the way to complex living systems including human beings, human consciousness, and, we assert, human economies. We can therefore develop the practical metrics needed to monitor and manage regenerative economies effectively, and discover the true path to a broadly shared prosperity in the process. At the heart of the Pope’s important message is a call for a new way to think, not a preference of one ideology over another, much less one religion over another. It is really a call to rediscover what we already know: the beauty of our essential long-standing humanist values and traditions. The reductionist logic of the “progress” of modernity must be subordinated to these core values. Nothing more. Nothing less. How many in our polarized Congress on the right or the left will get it?